The Department of Earth Sciences was first established in 1984 and has been growing steadily ever since. The primary mission of the department is to nurture students to be capable of doing independent research and application for their future academic or professional careers.

Currently there are 22 full-time faculty members, covering five major research areas in Earth Sciences, including Astronomy (5, with expertise in radio and extragalactic astronomy, planetary science), Atmospheric Sciences (6, specialty in climate modeling and mesoscale meteorology), Geology (5, tectonics, petrology and paleontology), Geophysics (3, seismology and repeating earthquakes), Oceanography (3, physical oceanography and science education).

There are about 160 undergraduate students, ~70 graduate students in MS program and ~25 PhD graduate students. To become internationalized, the Department has offered courses taught completely in English and has recruited several English-speaking non-Chinese faculty members. In addition, the Department is expected to hire 1 more faculty member in a year or two.

The Department has been very active in forefront research and rather productive publishing many refereed SCI and SSCI journal papers each year.